From a drunken Lennon to lyrical 'Brandy Alexander'

Ron Sexsmith's songwriting collaboration with Feist would never have happened if John Lennon and Harry Nilsson hadn't had way too much to drink at the Troubadour club in Los Angeles in 1974.

The ex-Beatle and his raucous songwriting pal were downing brandy Alexanders that well-documented night, resulting in behavior that led to their forcible ejection from the club.

When Leslie Feist saw Sexsmith drinking one of the cocktails at a party in Ottawa, she asked what it was. Sexsmith told her the story of the Lennon-Nilsson debacle.

"Three days later, I received an e-mail from her with this lyric in it," Sexsmith tells the Montreal Gazette.

He took it to the piano, and a quick session later, "Brandy Alexander" had music.

"I'm a Luddite," Sexsmith says. "I don't have anything to record on, so I never had a tape of it to give her.

"About a year later, when I was in Los Angeles recording 'Time Being,' I saw that Leslie was playing across town. So I took a cab, and I played it for her in her dressing room. She recorded it onto a Dictaphone."

Feist's hushed, sultry version came out last year on her platinum-selling "The Reminder." Sexsmith recorded a more upbeat interpretation on his latest album, the excellent "Exit Strategy of the Soul."

"I had no intention of recording it," Sexsmith says. "It wasn't until after I heard her version, which I loved, that I got to thinking that, in my head, I heard it as more of a party song."

And if inspiration is gradually earning Sexsmith a chapter in the Great Canadian Songbook, he responds with typical modesty when asked about his contribution. "I've just tried to uphold the tradition. I didn't want to let it down or embarrass the country. [But] I haven't changed anything.

"All these people who have been my heroes never let me down," he says, singling out Gordon Lightfoot as an example.

"Maybe there's a record that wasn't your favorite one by so-and-so, but you always give them the benefit of the doubt because you know that they're not trying to put anything over on you," he says. "I just tried to be a link in that chain."